Thanksgiving - 2007
The World should Give Thanks for America

Speaking as a misfit
unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of
holidays.

Christmas is
celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: In
Continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and
lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from Dec. 22 to mid-January
and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake
and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit.
All part of the rich diversity of our world.

But Thanksgiving
(excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version)
is unique to America. "What's it about?" an Irish visitor asked me a
couple of years back. "Everyone sits around giving thanks all day?
Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?"

Well, Americans have a
lot to be thankful for.

Europeans think of
this country as "the New World" in part because it has an eternal
newness, which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you
could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod?

And just when you
think you're on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an
entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood
movies where the guy tells the waitress "Gimme a cuppa joe" and slides
over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee
now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice
between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles
and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato.

Who would have
foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru
restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all
and turn it into a Kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!

But Americans aren't
novelty junkies on the important things. The New World is one of the
oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old
World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are
traditionalists.

We know Eastern Europe
was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that
Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots
going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and
Germany's constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy's only to
the 1940s, and Belgium's goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it's
not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S.
Constitution is not only older than France's, Germany's, Italy's or
Spain's constitution, it's older than all of them put together.

Americans think of
Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century
churches, but the Continent's governing mechanisms are no more ancient
than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most
of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at
sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next,
which is why they're so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas 
communism, fascism, European Union.

If you're going to be
novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich.

Even in a supposedly
50/50 nation, you're struck by the assumed stability underpinning even
fundamental disputes. If you go into a bookstore, the display shelves
offer a smorgasbord of leftist anti-Bush tracts claiming that he and
Cheney have trashed, mangled, gutted, raped and tortured, sliced 'n'
diced the Constitution, put it in a cement overcoat and lowered it into
the East River. Yet even this argument presupposes a shared veneration
for tradition unknown to most Western political cultures: When Tony
Blair wanted to abolish, in effect, the upper house of the national
legislature, he just got on and did it.

I don't believe the
U.S. Constitution includes a right to abortion or gay marriage or a
zillion other things the Left claims to detect emanating from the
penumbra, but I find it sweetly touching that in America even political
radicalism has to be framed as an appeal to constitutional tradition
from the powdered-wig era.

In Europe, by
contrast, one reason why there's no politically significant pro-life
movement is because, in a world where constitutions have the life
expectancy of an Oldsmobile, great questions are just seen as part of
the general tide, the way things are going, no sense trying to fight it.
And, by the time you realize you have to, the tide's usually up to your
neck.

So Americans should be
thankful they have one of the last functioning nation-states. Europeans,
because they've been so inept at exercising it, no longer believe in
national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to.
This profoundly different attitude to the nation-state underpins, in
turn, Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the
United Nations.

But on this
Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American
national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive
happens  a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan 
the United States can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours
and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water
supply.

Aside from Britain and
France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way
anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in 
shoring up Afghanistan's fledgling post-Taliban democracy  most of them
send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent
them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base.

If America were to
follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual
military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier,
and far more unstable. It's not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans
who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown
plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most
benign hegemon in history.

That said,
Thanksgiving isn't about the big geopolitical picture, but about the
blessings closer to home. Last week, the state of Oklahoma celebrated
its centennial, accompanied by rousing performances of Rodgers and
Hammerstein's eponymous anthem:

"We know we belong to
the land -- And the land we belong to is grand!"

Which isn't a bad
theme song for the first Thanksgiving, either.

Three hundred and 14
years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them
in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and
that, too, is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to
Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement
for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that
united a baker's dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to
expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii.

Americans should, as
always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand
just how rare in human history their blessings are.